


an integrated circuit

by 8611



Series: the body electric [2]
Category: James Bond (Craig movies), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Computers, Cyborgs, M/M, Medical Inaccuracies, Mild Gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-13
Updated: 2012-12-13
Packaged: 2017-11-21 01:55:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/592146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/8611/pseuds/8611
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He’d lied to Bond when he’d said that the helicopter crash had been more painful (Cyborg!Q).</p>
            </blockquote>





	an integrated circuit

**Author's Note:**

> This is not a happy or pleasant story. The main plot deals with a rather large loss of agency on Q’s part, and his coping with both that and what it means to be human. Whatever happened in Bond’s past to make him the kind of person who kills people on an order is very briefly discussed, and Bond purposely pushes Q over a line at one point (although while he’s trying to help, it’s not out of malicious intent). Q also ‘dies’ twice. He gets better (and only one is on screen, as it were).
> 
> On a less serious note, this whole thing plays loose and fast with medical and computer sciences, cunt gets used as an insult, and there’s a bit of gore in the discussion of Q’s injuries. The timeline is a little bit weird because I was trying to line it up with Skyfall as best as I could, and Q ends up on the ground so many times it might as well be a running gag. This also deviates from [the body electric](http://archiveofourown.org/works/580260) in a few places, mostly at the end, because I didn’t want to rewrite scenes word for word.
> 
> One good thing though – I promise this has a happy ending. 
> 
> (Also, I stole a line from Joss Whedon. And no, it's not 'I can kill you with my brain'.)

He’d lied to Bond when he’d said that the helicopter crash had been more painful. That wasn’t painful at all, because the last thing Q remembers is accepting Kara’s (the handler that the CIA had tasked to him) hand and stepping into the Apache, the roar of the blades making it so that Kara’s lips were moving but silent. And that’s it. Blank. No pain, because there’s no memory there. There’s no memory of takeoff, or the rocket, or the fire or wreck. 

Q has no memories until he wakes up (and there’s something artificial there, like there are drugs behind his being awake) to find himself in a disturbingly white and streamlined medical center. Everything in the room is white or light grey, the one exception being the man sitting in a corner of the room, with his dark grey suit and blue tie. He looks up when Q tries to move, groans, something broken and guttural because hasn’t spoken in a month. 

“Don’t try to move,” the man says, gets up and leaves his pad of paper and pen on the chair where he’d been. He presses a hand to Q’s chest, and Q stills, closes his eyes again. It hurts to breath, like something’s been done his ribs, and his throat is so dry it may well be on fire. 

Q tries to ask where he is, but nothing comes out. He can’t get his mouth to form words, and he makes a frustrated sound instead, some hacking noise, that turns into a cough, and his ribs _scream_ at him. He grits his teeth, squeezes his eyes shut even further, and the man runs a hand through his hair, saying soothing little things that Q doesn’t pay attention to because he can’t move, and he’s trying to, and his whole upper body is a cornhusk in a forest fire and in a moment of panic –

_No no no not my arms, I need those, I need my fingers_ ¬– 

The man is saying something now, clipped words, and then he’s yelling for someone and Q is trying to scream and he can’t even do that. 

There are footsteps and then nothing, and that’s not even the most painful thing Q will experience in the coming months. 

\---

The second time he wakes up he feels like he’s swimming in his own head, sedated and giddy and _everything’s fine, Mr. -----_. 

The man in the grey suit is back, and he sits on Q’s bed this time, and tells him that it’s fine, he’s on an American base and they’ve put him back together, but he’s still healing, and he can understand that, right? Good, good, there’s a hand in his hair again and Q feels like a child. 

They make him sit up a few days later, and he wants to scream but he’s still having problems just saying _yes_ and _no_ , whispered and broken. The ‘y’ in _yes_ is the hardest thing in his life right now. 

He hunches over, his hands trying to grip his knees but his fingers aren’t responding correctly, and he leans into one of the nurses holding him up, gasping and shuddering and at this angle his spine feels like it’s been twisted all the way around and back. It feels wrong. There’s not just the pain, but something _wrong_. 

It’s when they’ve carried him to the bathroom and stripped him to the waist in the tub one day that he realizes two things. 

The first is that he’s now got razor thin, incredibly pale scars running down his sides, across his collarbones, down the insides of his arms. His skin is too smooth, too bright, and the part of Q’s brain that isn’t a snarl of pain and anger and fear, something less animal and more logical, notes that they must be skin grafts with the way they press up against the skin on his lower legs that he’s always had. 

The second thing is that as he’s focusing on the scar that runs down to his left hip, his vision shifts, and, like a telephoto lens, moves. The second thing is that he doesn’t have his glasses, and his vision is sharper than it ever was before his eyes started going when he was nine. The second thing is that he doesn’t have his eyes anymore. 

It takes two people holding him down to stop his thrashing, and now he’s actually screaming and moving and he claws at the eyes they’ve put in his head and sobs, begs, slurred words that sound like nothing to the nurses and doctors but Q knows exactly what they mean. 

_What did you do to me?_

\---

After the episode in the tub he doesn’t move for three more days because the pain he managed to cause feels like every bone in his body has shattered and left splinters in every muscle. They give him three days, and then they get him up and using his arms and Q sets to the task like it’s the only thing in life because _it is_ at this moment. Q can do this, Q likes tasks. Get his arms back in shape. Grab a ball. A cup handle. A pencil. Write. Type. Code. 

He can’t even write his name by the end of a month, but he can hold his body up on a set of parallel bars, arms straining and sweat on his brow and upper lip. The weight he’d lost being kept under by drugs for too long starts to come back in muscles that he’s never had before, because he’s never had to learn to reuse his limbs like they’re useless dead things being coaxed back into the light. 

The first thing he does when he can raise his arms over his head is feel for his spine, where something has been wrong since he woke up.

That turns into a repeat of the tub incident, except this time he’s on the floor of a rehab room and when his head and back slam into the tile (tackled by a handler) they click and the impact jars him in a way that he didn’t think it would, makes him arch his back off the floor and howl in pain. He’s just been acquainted with the fact that having direct metal conduits to his spinal cord and brain stem mean he can feel pain in ways that had never even occurred to him until this moment. 

He asks for a mirror a few days later. They don’t give it to him. Q head-butts one of his handlers in retaliation because he’s taken stock of his body enough to feel the lip over the top of his head, under his scalp, where bone has been replaced with metal. The man goes down with no fuss, unconscious in a heap on the floor in a quick heartbeat. Q has a moment to wonder what he’s doing, shocked at his own movement, and then someone is advancing on him with a syringe.

He gets sedated for that one. When he wakes up the man in the grey suit is back, only it’s a black suit this time. 

“Insubordination won’t get you anywhere,” the man says. Q smells military on him for the first time, now that his kindly doctor guise has been dropped, and Q can see the cut of the suit and the short hair and the calm anger. 

“Yes, well you lot are the ones who gave me a built-in crash helmet,” Q says, because at least he can speak now. He can’t walk, but he can bite. “Thank you, by the way.”

“We _fixed_ you,” the man says. 

“Correction,” Q says, and holds up a hand. “You rebuilt me like a machine. I’m a human being, you _cunt_.” 

If Q could walk he would have gotten out of bed and tried to get his hands around the man’s throat, but he can’t, and that’s a damn shame. 

So, he bites. The man frowns. 

“Your boss did say that you’d be a handful,” the man says eventually, and it’s carefully calculated. Q knows it’s a carrot to be dangled in front of his nose, but the man’s made one mistake. 

“Q or M?” Q asks. The man stares back at him, and Q wonders how fast the cogs are whirring in his brain. Q will not be bested by some government animal with a bad Army cut in a suit that was given to him just so that he could look like he knew what he was doing. He’s just another handler, Q knows that now. 

“Does it matter?” He says finally. Mistake number one.

“Infinitely,” Q says, because he knows M would not care if they lost him, although the Major might. He’s always been sentimental. 

Q also knows that only M would say he was a handful, as she was the one sitting across the stainless steel table from him a number of years ago, holding the key to his cuffs and his future life all in one hand. 

Still, they’ve done one thing right. They’ve let him know that Home is aware of where he is. 

\---

They give him a mirror. Q almost laughs when he sees they’ve given him modified PS/2 ports, wonders if they’re going to give him a keyboard and mouse from the 90’s as well to complete the picture. 

The one at the top gives him pause though, and he can’t touch it for weeks afterwards, this obviously aftermarket gaping wound they’ve given him that must fit directly into the space between his brainstem and cerebellum. Q has no idea why they’ve done this, turned him into a freak extra from some cyberpunk movie, because if they plan on using him as a human processer they’re at least fifty years too soon on that move. The technology doesn’t exist. The technology needed to invent the technology doesn’t exist. They’ve got to be three generations, four, more, away from using humans as computers. And Q would know. This is what he does.

He falls the first time he tries to push himself up out of a wheelchair. It takes a horrifyingly long time to just take one step. Two takes longer. Three longer still. He curls up in bed in his white room at night exhausted, and the first day he manages to make it across the rehab room he slams into the wall at the other end, hits his head on the wall and grits his teeth and listens to his skull make a sound like a steel drum. 

After that there’s a gym, and he works with a trainer. He’s military, the same as the others, and he leaves Q as exhausted as any of the rest, arms and legs shaking and breathing rough and gasping. They make him throw, walk, turn, write this, type that, over and over again. They test him, poke and prod at him, track healing and god knows what else on charts Q isn’t allowed to see. He feels like a hamster on a wheel with no chance of getting off of it any time soon. 

It’s months later, when he can run, when he sees Kara again. Her hair is short, just covering her ears, and the sports bra she’s wearing doesn’t hide a single one of her ports. They run side by side on the track until someone’s lungs give out and they end up lying on the floor in the far lane, head to head, staring at the ceiling. 

“Sorry,” he says finally, and she huffs out a rough laugh. 

“Oh please, like you don’t know what I’ve been through. Don’t apologize.”

They get up and run again. It’s six months since he nearly died and Q is in the best shape of his life. 

One of the handlers comes to collect them for dinner and when he tries to grab them both by the upper arm Kara sweeps his legs out from under him at the same time that Q slams his shoulder against the mans’ chest. The man ends up on the floor coughing, breath knocked from his lungs, and that night their handlers start showing up armed. 

Mistake number two: leaving people you’ve built to be in perfect condition with their own thoughts and emotions. 

\---

It’s some time after the handlers make it clear that they’re carrying that Q is lead into what he instantly knows is an interrogation room, and he expects the man in the grey suit to be sitting at the table. Instead, there’s a man whose hairline is receding, and he’s got a small smile on his face as he gets up to shake Q’s hand. 

“I’m really incredibly sorry about this all, Mr. -----,” the man says, and Q collapses into the other chair in relief, puts his head in his hands and wants to laugh because the man sounds like _home_. When Q looks up at the man, he’s looking slightly worried. 

“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to, I just – I’ve heard nothing but hard r’s for six months,” Q says, and understanding flickers across the man’s face. 

“Well, I’m here to fix that,” the man says, smiles. “I’m Tanner, M’s chief of staff. I know it has taken too long, but we’ve secured your release back into SIS custody, in four days.”

“I can do four days,” Q says, because he can. He’s lived six months in a building without windows and without a location, had his body made something that isn’t his own, he can cope with four days. 

(They change their routines so that he doesn’t see Kara, and Q knows it’s because they’re afraid their computers are going to act like humans, form attachments, make friends, and it brings his anger back, fresh and razor sharp.)

They wake him up at some ungodly hour the fourth day and show him to an incredibly bright room he’s never seen before, where one wall is glass from floor to ceiling and there are people sitting behind it, some in very nice suits, some in military uniforms. One, the shortest of the bunch, is wearing a grey dress and a black blazer with a poppy in the lapel, and Q’s thoughts get jumbled somewhere between _M_ and _it’s November_. 

She stares at him, lips pressed tight, and Q gets the idea that he’s not going to like what’s about to happen.

They sit him on a stool in the middle of the room, and, from a metal box mounted on the wall, start dragging out heavy lines of cabling, and, oh. No, Q’s not going to like this at all. They’re switching him on. He hunches over, shirt gone, as they start fitting plugs to ports, each one making him shiver because he can feel it when they click neatly into place, can feel the reverb up his spine. He grips into his legs so hard that his fingers go white and his arms shake and the last one has a bloody giant spike on the end, and Q knows where that’s going. 

“This is going to feel odd,” the person who Q assumed to be the head tech says, pats his shoulder awkwardly. Q has a feeling ‘odd’ is the understatement of the century, considering the weight pulling at his back already is strange, alien. 

It slips in and Q’s face twitches, and he rolls his shoulders because it’s strange and he can’t quite put words to it, and he’s thinking about making a _is that all?_ joke when the tech turns the plug to the right, locks it into place. 

Q’s world goes white. 

There was one night, when it was late, when he and a colleague had gotten bored and started googling things – the size of Wikipedia, of Google, of the internet, of the human brain, terabytes on terabytes. What they found was that the human brain, on the very, very high side, is equivalent to around 1000 terabytes. The actual number is probably much lower. 

The internet isn’t really possible to quantify in terms of size, not easily. There’s no clean, round number. The point is, Q knows it’s more than 1000 terabytes. 

The human brain can’t deal with that much data being dumped on it like a sack of especially high tech rocks. 

Q will never know exactly what happens in those few seconds, aside from the whole of the world’s data being dumped into his head, but what he does know is that he’ll never experience pain like that ever again in his life, because he’s sure that there is nothing worse. 

(Later, when Silva is in his head, when he’s trying to put his brain back together, that doesn’t even come close.)

\---

He comes to flat on his back, staring at incredibly bright lights, and there are two techs hanging over him, one holding defib paddles. 

“Oh good, you’re alive,” one of them says. 

“Did you just stop my heart?” Q groans, rolls onto his side and props himself up on a shaking elbow because what’s a heart attack to go with six months of the kind of pain that he never even entertained knowing? 

“Not on purpose,” the other tech says. “We thought it might happen though. It’s fine, we got you back in just a few seconds.”

“Oh, excellent,” Q says, sarcastic and caustic. His chest feels like someone’s set it on fire. “Let’s not do that again.”

“Well, we, uh… we need to hook you back up. Try again. We’re just going to start with the internet traffic from the Philippines.”

“That can’t be too horrible,” Q mutters, accepts a hand to help him up, and he nearly falls, his legs are shaking so hard. He thinks about running in that moment, but he can’t run in his present state, and anyway, he can feel the security system and he’s not sure he’s up to disarming –

\- hold on. Q cocks his head to the side, frowns, stares at the floor without really seeing it. He ignores his shaking body and instead concentrates on the three signals he’s currently feeling _in his head_. One is the security system, which he knows is fully digital, very high tech, and not operated by any human commands, although it does have manual overrides. The second is the computer system controlling the lights, water, temperature, such things. The third is the thrum of data somewhere in the walls, and he realizes it must be the computer network in the building. He can’t access it, but he knows that it’s American, it’s governmental, and it’s probably got to do with the paramilitary arm of the CIA. 

That’s interesting. They’ve apparently equipped him with wireless hook-ups. 

The hardline goes in again. Q screams this time, topples off the stool, curls up and holds his head in a vice grip, but the good news is that his heart keeps beating. 

The Philippines has a large amount of internet traffic. When Q finally grounds himself, manages to sit up on the floor, legs crossed and eyes black and unseeing, he finds himself facing a black wall that reads him data - climate, wind, traffic, search engine queries, instant messages, it goes on and on. 

He folds that black wall into a black box, reads from a local news site about a politician’s death in Brunei, the weather in Papua New Guinea, checks the rugby scores from Australia. He forces the data into a stream that he can deal with, sort through, make sense of. 

Then, he grins, and searches out the 12 mobiles he can feel in the room, the one back in the real world, and finds the one with a +44 number, sends it a text message. 

_Looks like you’ve got yourself a new mainframe. I didn’t like the old once much anyway, you do know IBM has released new product in the last decade?_

They pull out his hard lines, leave him on hands and knees on the floor trying to throw up (there’s nothing in his stomach), empty everything out of his body, and he’s sweating and shaking again and he doesn’t care, because when he looks up through his hair (it’s finally growing out) M is looking right at him, and now there’s something else on her face that might be pride. 

He also doesn’t care because he wants to get back to the new world he’s just been introduced to.

\---

He’s been in Guam. One month under, six in rehab, M explains. It’s the 2nd of November, he was right. (Granted, the poppy was a bit of a give away.) 

The US Marines have the decency to fly them to Hong Kong, where they get a flight back to London. Q curls up in a giant seat in first class and no one wakes him up at horrible hours or tells him what to do, or makes sure he knows they have a gun. Q hates flying, but there’s air traffic chatter at the back of his mind now that assures him that it’s smooth flying across Asia, no turbulence, no security threats, nothing that could potentially drop them 35,000 feet. He clings to it when he’s awake, and when he’s asleep he doesn’t have to think. 

Halfway through the flight M hands him a binder. Medical files. Greater damage to right side, rebuilt knee and shoulder, pins and plates in more bones than he wants to count. Shattered ribs, snapped collarbone, long bones trashed, compression fractures to the spine, punctured lung lacerated spleen bruised kidneys torn ligaments third degree burns intracranial bleeding cardiac arrest. Medically induced coma, drugs to speed up metabolism and recovery.

Rewired, spinal column and brain. Twelve ports, eleven modified PS/2 for high capacity, one that only has a file number designation and probably hasn’t ever been seen outside that facility. 

By the end of the report Q’s incredibly surprised it took him only seven months to go from zero to sixty, he should have been out for at least a year. He also knows that whatever they pumped him full of while he was under probably isn’t commercially available. Or legal. 

They land in one piece. A sleek black car picks them up, after M has handed Q a heavy scarf to hide his ports with and his glasses, which Q starts to protest about until he puts them on out of habit mid protest and realizes that they’re a HUD. 

Once they’re in the car, he pulls up his emails with no small amount of fear. In one corner of his glasses text flashes – _7,842 new messages_. He swipes it off his glasses with a fast blink, because he is _not_ dealing with that right now. 

“I’m dead, aren’t I?” He asks M instead, turning his head where it’s pressed against the window so that he can look at her. The glass is cold against his scalp. 

“Considering your present state and ability to converse, I’d say no,” M says, and there’s the edge of a glare around her tired eyes. 

“No, I mean, I’m assuming I’ve been declared legally dead,” Q says, tucks his chin into the scarf he’s still wearing, because those few seconds outside had sent trickles of cold pain down his spine. 

“Of course,” M says. “The unfortunate truth is that you don’t exist any more, and as such, are going to have to be confined to the Vauxhall Cross building until we find a suitable way to deal with the situation.

_The situation_. Yes, let’s put it that way. He’s under house arrest because he’s now a very, _very_ expensive piece of computer equipment. 

The car leaves them in the basement garage, and M is silent the whole ride in the lift, before the doors open and he follows her because he doesn’t know what else to do. Her office is large, floor to ceiling windows, and Q stands in the space awkwardly, until Tanner suddenly appears, flustered, because evidently one of the 00s has been kidnapped in Malta. 

Q tries to slip out, but M and her razor sharp eyes catch him. 

“-----,” she calls, and he turns, hand on the door. “You’re to be debriefed before the day’s out, and your department still thinks you’re dead. Don’t go too far.” 

He has no idea what to do with himself. He hasn’t had to think for himself in six months. 

He’s never been to the gym in the building before in his life, but he finds it with the help of the security cameras, flipping through them in his head. They’d luckily put him in tracksuit bottoms and trainers for the plane ride, so he strips off his jumper and digs into the running track until his lungs are burning. If anyone sees his back, well, that’s M’s problem to deal with. Q’s done more than enough caring about the world for a lifetime, let alone one day. 

\---

The room he spends most of the next almost-year in has three walls of LCD screens from hip to forehead. Each time he puts his main line in he loses a few moments to white-hot pain, like someone’s set each of his neurons on fire, and each time he pulls his main line out he doubles over, searing jolts running down his spine. 

It gets a bit better though, as time goes on. Or maybe he just gets used to it. What he takes longer to get used to is the circuitry growing under his skin. He notices it a few weeks in, sneaking over his shoulders from his ports, almost invisible when he’s unplugged but a faint, sharp blue when he’s jacked in. He traces it with wide eyes, staring over his shoulder at one of the mirrors in the locker room. On one hand, it amazes him, this ability his body has discovered to merge organic and mechanical. On the other, it’s bloody fucking terrifying. There’s more of it each week, curling over his collarbones, spreading down his arms and fanning out across his ribs like the roots of a tree. 

Three months and one week since wheels down at Heathrow, he gets a message in the corner of his glasses, no sender marked. He knows who it is immediately, and he can’t stop the grin that breaks across his face. 

_Long time, no talk. How’s tricks?_

He can hear her voice in his mind, somewhere. 

_I’m under house arrest for the foreseeable future, but on the upside SIS has a really excellent gym. Olympic quality track, you’d be very jealous._

_Similar problem on this end. Sadly, our gym is not that cool. We do have awesome food though._

(Q can’t say similar things about SIS cooking, the highlight of his life had happened last week when one of the security analysts from his department had brought him takeaway curry.)

_I’m highly jealous._

_You’re British, do you even know what real food tastes like?_

_Excuse me, I resemble that remark._

Q wonders if the laughter sparking at the back of his head is real, or just something he wants to hear. 

They trade messages from time to time, and for the most part Kara is his only human contact, aside from the other people who use the gym (so far afterhours Q has only seen a handful of field agents and all the 00s, save one, use it), and the occasional interaction with Q-branch. He’s technically in the same sub-basement as them, but they’re on opposite sides of the building, and he’s needed here much more than anywhere else. 

When he’s not plugged in he haunts the closed wing of the 7th floor, disused and dusty, and sets up a bedroom and even a proper kitchen, kettle and all. He’ll spend time on the roof as well, and although any cravings for nicotine he’d once had are long gone, washed out of his system with a prior life he’s already forgetting, he’ll still smoke occasionally, watching the lights of the city past the end of his cigarette. 

One night, when he’s standing near the edge of the roof, chin tucked into a now endless amount of giant, fluffy scarves he’s acquired (never mind that it’s March, but the metal in his back gets cold too easily), the door open and a woman comes out, idly tapping away on a mobile with one hand and eating an apple with the other. She stops and looks up at Q a few steps from the access stairs, and he just stares at her over his shoulder, eyes wide and all sorts of things flying through his mind at once – he’s got his scarf up fairly high, his hair is long and unruly again and hides his main port decently well, it’s dark –

“Sorry,” she says, and tucks the mobile in her pocket. “Mind if I join?”

“Uh, no, that’s fine,” Q says, unsure, and outside of M, Tanner, and the couple of agents who have seen him, this woman might be the first who doesn’t have clearance to even know he exists. 

They stand in silence for a few moments, the woman finishing her apple and Q sneaking frantic glances at her as he slinks further down into his scarf, before she finally speaks. 

“I’m Eve, by the way,” she says, smiles at him. He smiles back, over his scarf, and she laughs. “You look like you’re on a polar expedition.”

“Thyroid condition,” Q lies. “Makes it so that the cold hurts.”

“You should move to Spain,” Eve suggests. 

“I don’t think the agency would like that very much,” Q says. He can see it now – M livid beyond all other anger because her mainframe has absconded to Ibiza to work on his tan. Eve smiles, and there’s something knowing in her expression. 

“Do you have a name? Or shall I just call you Scarf Boy?” Eve asks. 

“Uh, it’s Quentin,” Q says.

“Please tell me you’re one of Q-branch’s,” Eve says, grinning at him.

“I am actually.”

“Oh, that’s too perfect. You should be Q after the Major retires, it’d be excellent.”

“I have-“ Q has to stop, frown out at the city, because that friend thinks Q is dead, “- _had_ a friend from when I was a boy who called me Q, actually. When I was first hired my biggest regret was that I couldn’t tell him that I was now working for a man named Q.”

“Break up?” Eve asks, and Q shakes his head. Eve doesn’t push it. 

“Can I ask you a question?” Q asks. 

“I just totally invaded your personal life, have at it.”

“What are you doing on the roof at half two in the morning?”

“Ah, well, the answer to that depends on your clearance level.”

Q looks at her out of the corner of his eye, and she’s smiling off into the distance, bitterness somewhere in her expression. 

That’s when Q realizes that she’s probably a field agent, and he relaxes his shoulders, and based on the cold ache at the top of his neck he’s probably got his top two ports fully visible. 

When they turn to go back in Eve stops him with a hand on his arm. 

“Would you mind if I called you Q?” She asks, and Q finds that actually, he’d quite like that. 

\---

Q’s doing laps with 004 (Q, for all his newfound running prowess, is still chopped liver next to the 00s, although 004 will humor him on the mornings or nights when she’s still on the wrong time zone and Q is bored) at just past four in the morning when Tanner steps out onto the track, looking hilariously out of place in his three button suit. They come to a stop next to him, Q doubling over to hold himself up on his knees and 004 taking the opportunity to rest her arm across his back and use him as a crutch. Q’s pretty sure they’ve been running for about an hour, on and off, and his whole respiratory system feels like acidic sandpaper. 

“You two make a disturbing combination,” Tanner notes dryly. “And actually, I don’t need you, 004.”

“Have fun,” she tells him, and sails off in the direction of the locker room on her stupidly long legs. 004 is everything SIS loves in their 00s – gorgeous, intuitive, deadly, and totally sociopathic. Q kind of likes her. He’s got a weird soft spot for the 00s, who he provides with intel. Except one, who he _still_ hasn’t met, although as of a few months ago his file had said KIA, so Q was probably never going to meet 007. If the stories were true, that was probably better for his general state of being and existing in one piece. 

“Has someone hacked the Queen’s emails?” Q asks, still out of breath and gasping for air between every few words.

“No,” Tanner says, frowning. “M wants to see you.” 

“At four in the morning?” Q asks, incredulous, and then stands up to stretch his hands over his head, pop out his shoulders, making Tanner wince at the noise before he drops his arms. Q can’t exactly blame him, one of his shoulders makes a disturbingly metallic noise ever time he cracks it now. 

“Yes, well, sudden resignations do happen at odd hours,” Tanner says, and Q frowns at that, follows Tanner through the rabbit warren of the building to M’s personal lift. 

She’s sitting behind her desk, and the only light on is the one next to her elbow. She looks up when Tanner deposits Q in her office, leaving him in one of the chairs across the desk. 

“You look like hell,” M notes. “What on earth have you been doing?”

“I apologize, I was running,” Q says, feels very small under M’s gaze. “Tanner fished me off the track.”

“That’s fine,” M says, dismissive, “and unimportant. You’re being promoted.”

“I-“ Q stares at her for a moment, his jaw slightly unhinged. “I’m being promoted.”

“Major Boothroyd sent in a resignation at exactly midnight. We’re launching an inquiry. In the mean time, you’re to head Q-branch.”

“Ma’am, with all do respect, I can’t work from the mainframe and be in Q-branch at the same time.”

“That’s fine, we’ll work something out. Normally we’d upgrade your security clearance, but obviously you need no such thing.”

The only person in this country who has higher clearance than Q is probably the PM himself. 

After M dismisses him he goes back to the 7th floor in a daze, weaving through the halls, trying to figure out exactly how he’s just been put in charge of a whole branch of the SIS. 

He shuts himself in his room and slumps down the wall opposite the windows, his hair sticking up in the back from running and sweat. He stays there for a long time, idly checking systems through his wifi connections, half distracted.

Systems normal. Except for his. 

Q watches the sun rise over his empty, messy bed, and knows that he’s about to get into it above his head by some margin. 

A week later he’s plunged into darkness when the power to the building fails due to an explosion on one of the upper floors. 

\---

Q’s jacked in to his new room in the new building and working through intel from the Turkish government, pulling it from the network like a silver thread, when he’s aware that someone else is in the room with him. He shifts from a space of a data to a room of LCD screens and cables and turns around, where he finds M standing with a man he’s never seen in real life before, just in image files. Ah, so this one completes his set – the missing 00 agent. So much for that KIA. 

“007,” he says, smiles, and the man looks guarded and unsure, like he’s got no idea what to do with Q. Q’s not surprised, he must look strange right now, with his hard lines and circuitry. 

“This is Q,” M tells 007, and the man nods, quick and stiff, although he still comes back to see Q when he gets back from Macau, and Q tells him about Silva. 

After that, Q doesn’t see much, because he’s too busy trying to dig Silva out of his skull before he goes offline. 

Stupid, really. Over eager, idiot, crossing the street without looking. Q knew this would happen. 

He wakes up in one of the recovery rooms in the medical division with a shaved head, a throbbing behind his eyes, and a cotton dry mouth. After lying there for a while trying to coax his body all the way out of sleep he’s able to sit up to find he’s got a single IV. He squints at the bag, and his eyes close in on the label, bringing the neat black type into clear focus. It’s just a banana bag, he can’t be doing too badly. 

Except for the fact that when he reaches up to run a hand through his hair, he finds a bandage over the top of his skull, where the metal sits. 

“Lovely,” Q mutters to the room, and then spends five minutes dragging the memory from the depth of his brain before he remembers what happened. Silva had happened, had curled across Q’s ports and around his brain like smoke, left something angry and twisted behind to make Q scream and break. If he were in a better mood he might laugh at the ridiculousness – he’d gotten a computer virus. He can feel a number of systems thrumming around him though, so something must still be working. 

He reaches out slowly, cautiously, to send Eve a message. He falls out of bed for his trouble, limbs uncoordinated and head splitting open as he slams the heel of a hand repeatedly against his temple. When he finally stops moving he’s flat out on his back, staring at the ceiling, and the headache behind his eyes is searing. 

So maybe things aren’t working so well.

A nurse finds him still on his back, and her eyes go wide as she kneels down to check him for injuries before gingerly helping him sit up. 

“Can I maybe have some paracetamol?” He asks, voice quiet and rough, and somehow he ends up with a morphine drip instead, which really is overkill of the highest order. 

\---

He wakes up without any IVs the second time, and he blinks at the wall before flipping over, looking out the sliding glass door at the movement of people in medical. There are enough personnel and patients up and about that it must be what normal people call _business hours_. 

Q sits up carefully, aware that he’s sore in various places, but the only sigh of a headache is a small arch of throbbing across his forehead. That’s good, at least. 

What’s even better is that someone has left his personal tablet and mobile on the chair next to the bed. Q grins when he sees the post-it on top –

_Play nice. – E_

What he’d do without Eve, he has no idea. First though, he drags heavy limbs to the bathroom, to take stock of what exactly they’d done to his head this time. The mirror over the sink is tiny, but it’s big enough to peel back the bandages and see a perfect round cut right where the edges of the metal cap is. He’s not sure if it was to take something out, or put something in, and he frowns, feeling cut off and useless. He’s not going to be worth shit if he can’t get his connections back up – he can’t even imagine what a hardline would do to him right now. 

He’s turning around when he realizes that something is missing. He catches a glimpse of skin through the back of his gown, where the sides come together, and finds that he’s got bandages carefully down his spine. He peels one back, finds that he’s missing a port. The bandages end up in the sink as he frantically works down his back, ripping off tape and guaze, and they’re all gone, all eight of the ports that linked up from T3 down to L4. They’ve left angry red marks, just starting to heal now. He stares over his shoulder for a long time, breathing hard, and finally brings up his hands to cup the back of his neck protectively, over the three ports he still has plus his main line. 

He has to actually grab the chart from the end of his bed to figure out who his doctor is – Puri, no idea who that is – before stalking out of his room and down the hall. He’s aware of some commotion behind him, and he’s not shocked – his back looks like hell right now. 

Dr. Puri’s door is at the end of the hall and shut, but it’s not locked and he looks up, unconcerned, when Q open his door, glaring. He looks calm, and Q can only assume that he normally has to deal with things like 00 agents if this is how he reacts to people flinging themselves into his office. 

“Q,” Puri says, and takes his glasses off. “I figured you’d be by soon enough.”

“Would you kindly explain what you’ve done to my system?” Q says, glares, eyes narrowed, and every wrinkle on Puri’s face is thrown into sharp relief as his eyes toggle back and forth between Puri’s face and the wider room. 

“Sit down,” Puri says, gestures to one of his chairs. Q kicks the door shut and takes a seat on the sofa in the corner instead. Puri doesn’t seem particularly surprised. Q drums his fingers on his thighs, heart going a million miles an hour, anger spiking around his body. 

“If you’re all planning on putting me out to pasture you could have-“

“You’ve been upgraded,” Puri interrupts him. “I’m hoping it will help with your connections’ healing process.”

Q doesn’t have much to say to that. It hadn’t even occurred to him that he could be upgraded, which really was rather short sighted of him, considering who he is. Everything can be upgraded. 

\---

Q’s managed to argue his release date down to two this afternoon, but in the mean time it’s only noon and so instead he’s reading a book on his tablet like a normal person. He’d much rather be coding, but it feels odd to use his fingers at this point, he needs to be doing it with his head, and that’s currently out of condition. 

(It worries him, if he’s being honest. Puri had tried to reassure him, but there’s doubt at the edge of his thoughts.)

When the door slides open he expect a nurse making sure he hasn’t flow the coop early, but he looks up to find a man he’s never met before looking down at him instead. He’s dressed like someone from accounts, and Q almost clicks his irises and runs a facial recognition though the agency before he realizes he can’t, and sighs, frustrated, pinches the bridge of his nose. 

“I haven’t disturbed you, have I?” The man asks, and Q shakes his head, moves his mobile from the chair next to the bed so that he can sit down. 

“No, I’m just having some… issues.”

“Dr. Puri’s told me he’s not sure when you’ll be back up in working order.”

Q’s head snaps towards this mild looking man who evidently has the clearance to get at his medical file (and what a read that must be at this point). 

“Who are you?” Q asks. 

“That’s what I’m here to talk to you about,” the man says. “My name is Mallory.” 

Q is silent, and Mallory takes it as an invitation to continue. 

“Have you been told what happened at Skyfall, in any capacity?”

“No.” Q doesn’t even know what Skyfall is. 

“Well, uh,” Mallory looks away for a moment, before looking back at Q. “I was told that she helped you up twice.”

There’s something cold in his gut, and Q draws a breath in, very quietly. 

“Where’s M?” Q asks. Mallory looks at him and Q can read it in his expression. 

“She passed last week,” Mallory says. “I’m sorry, Q.” 

Q stares at his hands. He’d originally felt resentment towards M, because he was angry and young and he felt like she was playing a stacked deck with the best hand. The second time she’d brought him in, he’d obviously felt differently. 

He wasn’t even that close to M, she wasn’t the sort of person you got close to, but she’d been there with a look of pride once in his life and that look had been important, when he was utterly broken and someone else was controlling his body for him, little more than a puppet. 

That had all mattered. 

“So you’re the new M?” Q asks, and he’s surprised that his voice is rough, although his eyes are dry. He’s dully aware of it enough to wonder if he can even cry anymore – probably not. 

“I am,” Mallory says, and Q nods stiffly. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

“No, I’m… I’ll be fine. I’m going to be fine,” Q says, and runs a hand across the top of his head, feels the ugly scabbing there, under the short bristles of his shorn hair.

When Mallory gets up to leave, something occurs to Q. 

“Bond and Silva?”

“Alive and dead.”

Q licks his lips, one corner of them quirking up, and distantly wonders when he started feeling _pleased_ at the thought of someone being dead.

\---

“I think Bond’s been having a bit of a freak out over you,” Eve says conversationally, staring at her fingers while Q wrestles a shirt over his head, wincing when it pulls a bit at the scabbing on his scalp. 

“Why?” Q asks, looking over at Eve. She’s sitting cross-legged on what’s currently operating as his bed, in a Spartan room that’s his only as long as they’re in this brick and glass hideout. It’s like something out a spy film, Q swears. 

“Evidently he’s been trying to call you,” Eve says. 

“Ah,” Q says. “I maybe should have given him my _actual_ mobile number, instead of the one for my brain.”

“You know, I’ve always wondered,” Eve says. “Could we use to get Orange Wednesday codes?”

Q rolls his eyes and looks over at Eve, who just grins like she’s asked a perfectly normal question. 

“I suppose I should email him or something,” Q sighs. Eve stretches out on the bed, long limbed, and reaches for his mobile where it’s sitting on the low bedside table. She starts tapping something out. “Or you could just text him for me.”

“Done,” Eve says, and then tosses the mobile to Q so that he can tuck it in his back pocket. “Although don’t expect a response any time soon, he’s horrible about checking his messages.” 

They clean up what’s left of lunch and head in opposite directions, Eve to go deal with Mallory and Q to head to his branch. Everything is half packed, half unpacked and there are things spilling out of boxes and containers everywhere. They’ve been told they’re moving again soon, but life has had to go on to some degree. 

004 is on a surveillance mission in Brussels, and while he’s talking to her, he reaches out without thinking to pull a bit of information from his laptop for her, and is surprised when after the initial spike of pain, the email goes through. 

“Huh,” Q says, stares at his computer. Something’s working. 

“Something wrong?” 004 asks, her voice tinny over speakerphone. 

“No, sorry,” Q says, and doesn’t try to do anything for the rest of the afternoon incase he does any damage. 

People start packing up, leaving at just past six, and he’s left with three of the people from his weapons R&D team when someone calls his name, and he turns to see Bond standing in the door. 

“Oh good,” Q says. “You got my text.”

(Eve’s text, close enough.)

He lies for a second time in as many minutes when Bond asks him what’s more painful than having Silva digging around in your brain. It’s an easy lie, to pretend like he remembers a crash that he only knows happened because it’s in his file and he spent seven months recovering. 

He’ll probably never be able to explain to another living being what it’s like having the world’s information dropped into your head all at once. The crash is easy, in comparison. 

That night, back in his room with no windows (he hates that, reminds him of Guam, he can’t get to the new building fast enough), he takes a long time to fall asleep as he tries to work out where Bond fits into his life. The other agents are easier – occasional work out partners, full time handfuls, people he guides through operations as little more than a voice with an internet connection. But they’re all fractured, every last one of them. 

Somehow though a piece of Bond has managed to slip under his skin, and Q frowns at the ceiling and parses it into two pieces. On one side there’s there the very simple notion that Bond is good looking. On the other hand, Bond is the most fucked up of a group of sociopathic human weapons. These two pictures don’t quite jive in his mind – Q, as a general rule, doesn’t sleep with people who can kill you with pens or tea towels. 

His brain slips around thoughts, and he’s aware that he’s been offline too long when his thoughts turn to Eve on his bed, and then tilt again in the direction of Bond, and then back again, the hand on his stomach slipping lower. He tosses off his covers with a frustrated sigh and does laps around the main hallway instead, barefoot and in nothing but a pair of football shorts. 

He ends up collapsing on the main office floor, limbs spread every which way, quiet and empty and dark, and closes his eyes, enjoys the cold cement against his back and his healing spine. 

He’s half asleep when he realizes he’s sending out connections without meaning to, tugging at the security system and the back up server. A headache coils at the back of his head and he pushes himself up, goes for another few laps, and when he finally collapses into bed the second time he doesn’t think, just sleeps. 

\---

The new building has too much dark wood, and somehow Q misses the building with no windows. He’s partial to glass and brick over mahogany and leather. 

They do, however, have a most excellent track. After his first test with a hardline ends up with him stumbling out of his chair in agony and slamming his head into the wall by accident (seriously America, thanks for the crash helmet), he breaks the track in with an angry pace and a splitting headache. 

(It’s too bad he can’t leave the building, he could probably run a few marathons at this rate.)

By the time he stops running it’s late and the headache is gone but his lungs are burning. Old hat, that. It’s fine. Breathing that ends in searing coughing is becoming a close personal friend of his. 

He hops the railing separating the track from the rest of the gym and nearly jumps out of his skin when someone holds out a water bottle for him. 

He does go flailing backwards about three feet though, before picking up a free weight from his right and wrenching his arm towards the water bottle. 

Bond’s other hand comes out to stop the weight, and he stands up from the bench he’d been sitting on (hiding in the shadows like a goddamn ninja), smirking. 

“You’re twitchy,” Bond says, taking the weight and setting it back down. Q can’t speak for a few moments because his heart is jackhammering in his chest. If Bond gives him another heart attack, Q can’t be held liable for his actions. Three before thirty is just ridiculous, especially if one of them is 00 induced. 

“You scared me!” Q says, and grabs the water bottle that Bond holds out for him again, drinking half of it in one go and then dumping the rest over his head before thrusting it back at Bond and stalking off for the locker room, water running down his face and shoulders because his hair is months from being properly grown out. 

Bond, being Bond, follows him at a more sedate pace. Q is aware that his hands are shaking, there’s so much adrenalin in his veins. He was ready to collapse a second ago, and then Bond’s little ninja act had put him on the highest alert he’s ever been at. 

He’s fumbling with his lock when Bond leans against the locker next to him and Q gives up, falling down onto the bench and clasping his hands, dragging in deep breaths to try to get his body to come down from its high. 

“You’re on,” Bond notes, and Q stares up at him confused. Bond reaches out, and Q flinches away, making Bond frown. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

Q lets Bond touch his shoulder, tracing what Q realizes is the path of one of his circuits. 

“I thought you had to be plugged in to do that,” Bond says.

“Adrenaline, probably,” Q says. “You really did scare me.”

“Apologies,” Bond says, and sits down next to him. He follows the line of Q’s legs with his eyes, kicked out and away from the bench, and Q looks away, feeling heat under his collar that doesn’t have to do with aching muscles or sweat. 

“So why are you stalking me?” Q asks, finally turning back to Bond. 

“Four said you were a runner,” Bond says, and Q gets the idea that Bond isn’t answering his question. “I didn’t realize you could keep up with her.”

“Meaning?” Q asks, and there’s something strange in his gut, a feeling he can’t identify. He can’t keep up with 004, he knows that. 

“You run until the only thing you feel is physical pain,” Bond says, shrugs, like he’s made a comment on some exceptionally boring weather pattern.

“I’ve had enough pain for a lifetime,” Q says. “I run because it’s distracting.”

Q realizes he’s made a mistake the minute he says it, because now Bond is going to take that ripped stich and pull at it until he’s got Q’s whole story unraveling at his feet. 

“Having been in a helicopter crash,” Bond says conversationally, and Q internally starts cursing himself, “I know that it’s not the worst thing you can experience. Just my training was worse, for one.”

“I can’t image training being worse than being maimed to almost death in a fiery flying death trap,” Q mutters. He finally gets up and gets his locker open, and he’s got his shirt and trainers off before Bond speaks. 

“Anything where you’re taken out of yourself and made to be something else is more painful,” Bond says. “And I’m guessing that your aftermarket parts aren’t SIS.”

Q grips his locker door hard enough that the metal edges start digging into his palm. 

“No, they’re not,” Q says, as detached as possible. 

“Did anyone ever ask if you wanted the world in your head?”

Q strips off his shorts, not caring that Bond is there. His world has narrowed to his own body, and he’s detached in the same way he is when his eyes are black as he shuts his locker and moves to the showers, turns on the water. Automatic. 

Bond finds him sitting on the floor, his legs perfectly long enough so that he can fit his back to one wall of the shower stall and have his feet flat against the opposite wall. He’s got his head tipped back against the tile, his eyes closed, and there’s water collecting in the hollows of his collarbones. 

“That was out of line,” Bond says. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize,” Q says, looks up at him, and thinks of a girl with brown hair and a matching set of ports to his own. “You know what I’ve been through.”

“I don’t.” 

“Something after a fashion.” Q motions with his hand, pulls Bond down, makes a decision. Bond’s still wearing his shorts and t-shirt and they cling to his skin, and he kneels down to straddle Q’s hips. His hands find and follow razor wire scars down Q’s sides with rough fingers. 

“It was out of line,” Bond says again.

“It was,” Q agrees, and kisses Bond.

\---

A month after Silva tosses his world on its head, Q get his hardline in. For a moment there is nothing but pain and then, even and quiet, there is data. Q gathers it between his fingers like liquid thread and weaves it, smiling softly when it follows his orders and he fits it into boxes and folders and files and everything just _fits_ again. 

“Make me a stone,” Q breathes, and Eve, who’d come along to make sure he didn’t hurt himself, looks at him strangely. He smiles at her with dark eyes and she fits into his digital world as a strange sort of welcome intruder, data around her, split half flesh and bone and half digital.

“What?” Eve asks, and Q shakes his head, still smiling. She leaves him be eventually, and Q just exists for a while, surrounded by things he’s missed this past month. He’s faster, he can feel that, the upgrades are certainly working. Thing have shifted as well, are slightly more real. He accepts it all, walks along a long hallway of data and doors and server holes. 

He steps inside a globe with dots on it, agents each reduced to a blinking red light in a square, and he finds Bond’s, pulls the map closer and rotates it until he’s staring at the outskirts of Hong Kong. Once he’s got the address, it’s easy enough to find the building schematics, shuffle through them, lay those over the map and let Bond transfer from the curve of the earth to the floors of the building. 

Someone from Q-branch is in his ear – _there should be a lift shaft_

“on your right,” Q finishes, spinning the building so that Bond’s dot is moving towards him. 

There’s a smile in Bond’s voice when he answers, something that Q isn’t used to hearing but could stand to hear more of. 

Bond comes back in one piece, and finds Q when he’s got a hand braced on a desk in Q-branch, pulling his lines out one by one. He almost doesn’t hear him, but he feels him when he’s near enough, first his mobile and the watch he’s carrying, and then his body heat when he’s right next to Q. 

Q looks up at him as Bond sets radio and watch down. He’s missing his tie, but otherwise he appears to be in one perfect piece. 

“Can I help?” Bond asks, and Q looks at him for a moment, wondering what Bond will do when he sees what Q’s main line looks like. As far as he knows, only Eve and Tanner have seen it (not even this new M has), and it’s not exactly the most human part of him. 

“Alright,” Q says, drops his hand, and when Bond pulls the plug loose Q feels his muscles tense as his brain fires back into action, the light creeping from his circuits as he exhales. He’ll never quite get used to that, the cessation of data and being totally organic again. It doesn’t hurt anymore, but it’s strange. 

Q turns around and hefts his body up on to the table, so that he can sag down a bit and run a hand through his hair (getting longer, still not long enough). It’s been a while since he’s had more than one line in for the whole day, and his back aches and his mind wanders now that he’s been put back in his own head. 

Bond watches him, and Q wonders what he’s watching for. When they’d first met Q knows that Bond had been trying to figure out what he was, now he seems to be trying to figure out what makes him tick, what’s made up of data and what’s run on blood. 

Bond finally reaches up and Q lets him curve a calloused hand around the back of his neck. The lack of sensation where his ports are is always strange, his body expects the tactile nature of his skin to give full feedback, but instead there’s an empty point in the middle of Bond’s hand, where he’s touching metal. 

Q’s not expecting it when Bond starts tracing the port directly underneath his main line, and he closes his eyes, breathes, listens to the slow chatter of the computers put into sleep mode for the night. In a room with so much tech, Bond is solid and very, very human, and Q opens his eyes again, concentrates on Bond. 

Bond’s fingernails are short and blunt, but when he suddenly rakes them over Q’s ports Q _feels_ it, and his eyes flutter closed, mouth open with a little gasp. He can feel light on his skin, traveling to his elbows before it stops, and Q slips a little bit, the data in the room rises and the humans drop away. Bond puts his body between Q’s legs, drags his nails over Q’s ports again, and Q’s back arches, the vibrations traveling down his spine. He grips the edge of the table and his breath is coming fast, and he can’t help the moan that slips out as he tips over into digital construct. 

When he opens his eyes the world is digital and Bond looks like Eve had looked days earlier, half made of constructed lines and half made of flesh and bone against the dark background of what had once been a box but has grown to be a world. Bond’s eyes flicker, the bright color interpreted as fully digital by Q’s vision. 

“Can you see like that?” Bond asks, brings his other hand up to run fingers down Q’s cheek, and Q nods, leans into the touch, and wraps data around them, stringing them together. Q doesn’t know how he’s gotten here without his hardline, but he welcomes it. Bond’s hands wander lower, under Q’s shirt, between fabric and warm skin, his fingertips slipping past Q’s waistband. 

“Perfectly,” Q says, breathy, and there’s heat in Bond’s eyes, spiking white in Q’s vision, and the kiss Bond presses to Q’s lips, sears onto him, is all red, a color caught between human and something else. 

\---

It’s a Sunday and the world isn’t ending, so Q’s spent the afternoon on the roof, stretched out in the sun and the unseasonably warm weather. So far he’s finished a book, worked halfway through a search algorithm program, and is currently sitting cross-legged with his tablet in his lap, tugging and teasing at the wireframe grenade hovering over it. 

He pulls it apart with wide fingers, playing Cat’s cradle with the individual pieces of the sphere as they shift outwards, explode. He stares at it, gives it a spin, and then sighs, collapsing the whole thing down. He’s not an engineer; he’ll have to work it over with the weapons R&D team tomorrow. It returns to pixels on his tablet, sitting in its corresponding project file. 

His mobile beeps from where it’s sitting near his left knee, and he reads the message as it pops up on his glasses. 

_Location?_

Q closes out of the file and locks the tablet screen, tucking it under his arm as he gets up and sends Bond a text back. 

_Just give me a moment, I’ll be right down._

He pulls up the latest operation alerts in his head and sees that Bond has indeed been called in last second because a priority target has popped up in Gdańsk after being off grid for nearly two years. Bond probably needs equipment, and Q has the keys to that particular kingdom. 

Bond’s not anywhere in Q-branch, and Q stands in the middle of Mission Control, frowns, and starts flipping through security cameras. When he can’t find him on any of them Q leaves his tablet and mobile on his workstation and heads for one of the few rooms in the building without cameras. 

His new room has holoscreens instead of LCD panels, something that Q is infinitely grateful for, and the minute his foot touches the ground of the mainframe they spring to life, and there’s data racing across the walls. Bond’s standing in the middle of it, hands tucked into his pockets and turned away from the door. 

“I thought you might need equipment, which, may I remind you, is not down here,” Q says, and grins as Bond turns around. 

“I can find it on my own,” Bond says. “I was wondering if I could get some information.”

Q reaches up for one of the cables hanging from the ceiling, and hands it over to Bond. 

“Well, let’s see what I can find on your man from Gdańsk,” Q says, and he lets Bond reach around his neck, fit his main line in and twist to the right. Q sucks in a breath, closes his eyes, feels sparks flood his system, and when he opens his eyes again the walls are gone and they’re in a box of his holoscreens, making their skin glow blue. 

Q finds an address, information, residences, associates in the area, all in one heartbeat, and by the next it’s feeding onto the mobile in Bond’s pocket. 

“You know you have to get my signature to have equipment released to you,” Q says.

“I’m aware,” Bond says. “Luckily, seeing as your name consists of a letter, it’s rather easy to forge.”

Q thinks about rolling his eyes. 

“Don’t do that again, and take the bio-coded PPK and one of the new tablets. I’ll unlock the equipment room for you.”

(Q-branch runs on computer locks, something Q finds extremely handy.)

“I’ll bring it all back in one piece,” Bond says. 

“I’ll believe that when I actually have everything back in my hands,” Q says, and Bond leans forward to kiss Q, running his hands up Q’s sides. His lips are warm, and Q’s more than happy to open under his hands and mouth, reaching up to hold Bond’s chin. 

“You’ll have everything back,” Bond says when he pulls back. 

“Good luck, 007,” Q says, his voice quiet and just a little bit rough. There’s data pulling at their skin, and Q knows Bond can’t feel it, but Q watches the way it slips over the curves of his shoulders. 

“Thank you, Q.” Bond smiles, one of his knife-cut grins, but there’s warmth behind his eyes, and they’re spots of glowing blue in Q’s vision as always. 

Bond returns with everything in one piece, and delivers it all into Q’s hands.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [【中譯】an integrated circuit](https://archiveofourown.org/works/749069) by [elendil](https://archiveofourown.org/users/elendil/pseuds/elendil)




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